Chimamanda Adichie defines herself as a storyteller, she’s an author who grew up with a middle class family in Nigeria. She recalls a memory of her mother telling her that she began to read at the age of two and write at the age of seven, but the books she became literate with were American and British children’s books that had only white characters. Adichie speaks on the impression that she was left with, that people like her couldn’t exist in the stories she loved. She speaks on how authors like Camara Laye and Chinua Achebe opened a whole new world of possibilities for her. When Adichie came to the United States for college, she started to realize that Americans viewed her simply as African and not much else. They questioned her ability to use a stove, and asked to hear her tribal music. She was hit with the reality that Americans see Africans as uneducated and impoverished. “ The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated…” . Adichie calls this a single story, a narrative left unfinished that changes the story entirely. She uses the example of Native Americans “Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans…”, depicting how a story told without all the context leads undeserving bias. Adichie has fallen victim to believing a single story herself. When she visited Mexico she expected to find streets filled with violence and tension, instead was surprised to find people like her that smiled on their way to work. She starts to recognize how a single story is formed through inadequate details and media coverage. When all the information comes in from Western sources, it gives America the opportunity to put out stories from one perspective, which forms one opinion.
When a story is told from one perspective it allows for that opinion to become the reality of the readers. Adichie uses the example of John Locke, on his voyage to Africa he writes of them as beasts. He retells this story and with no other perspective other than John Locke’s, people accepted what he said as the truth. I agree that this leads to enormous amounts of misinformation and spewed perspectives. The damage that these falsities have are detrimentally everlasting. I found myself relating to Adichie’s story when she spoke about her view on Fide’s family. Society paints certain people in a certain light, it leads to feelings like pity, anger and judgment to people who were undeserving of it. In our day in age the danger of a single story is the same danger since the time of John Locke; strong, powerful opinions that come from an incomplete narrative. This can ultimately lead to oppression of certain groups. I think Professor Barnes assigned this assignment to show us that everyone has a narrative to tell, that no person is just one thing.
